71 pages • 2 hours read
Frederick DouglassMy Bondage and My Freedom
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1855A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-13
Chapter 11 Summary: “A Change Came O’er the Spirit of My Dream”
Douglass lived with Hugh Auld for seven years. During some of those years, Hugh and Sophia treated Douglass less humanely, though not without some difficulty. Tommy, after all, loved Frederick, and so did Sophia. Hugh finally got his wife to see things from his side (not encouraging Douglass), but not without the consequence of losing a degree of domestic peace. Worse, his wife lost some of the qualities of goodness that had distinguished her. She soon became convinced that enslavement and education were incompatible. Though she relentlessly pursued Douglass to ensure that he did not have much alone time, and snatched books and newspapers out of his hand, she had already taught him too much to extinguish his curiosity.
Douglass began carrying a Webster’s dictionary. During playtime, he would give his white friends bread in exchange for a spelling lesson. Sometimes, he would confess to them his wish to be free and assert that he had as much of a right to freedom as they did. They all agreed with him. By the time he was 13, Douglass knew how to read. He had saved up enough money to buy the Columbian Orator. In it, he read a dialogue between an enslaver and an enslaved person in which the former charged the latter with ingratitude before allowing the enslaved person to speak on his own behalf. The enslaved person then launched forth with an argument against enslavement and was so adept at arguing his points that his enslaver emancipated him. Douglass read this speech and thought that one day he, too, could provide such well-reasoned arguments for his own freedom.
Douglass figured that pride, the desire for power, and greed were the reasons for enslavement and oppression. He came to regard enslavers as loathsome and, true to the enslaver Hugh’s prediction, became resentful of his condition. He nearly envied the ignorance of his fellow enslaved people. Douglass figured, too, that his sullenness was part of the reason for Sophia’s changed behavior toward him. He likely offended her with his downcast manner. He pitied her, though he never dared to share his troubles.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Religious Nature Awakened”
There were moments in which Douglass was so distressed that he considered suicide. At the same time, he was also eager to learn everything related to enslavement and eavesdropped on the enslaver Hugh and his friends when they discussed the subject, particularly when they talked about abolitionists. Douglass had no idea who these people were. What he did know was that enslavers loathed them. They assumed that, if an enslaved person had liberated themselves, it was because of the persuasion and assistance of one of these abolitionists. If an enslaved person revolted, it was also because of them. Douglass decided that he would find out what an abolitionist was and who they were. He looked first in the dictionary but could only find the most basic meaning of the word. He then found the information he sought in the local newspaper, the Baltimore American. There, in its columns, he found numerous “petitions and memorials […] praying for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and for the abolition of the slave trade between the states of the Union” (167).
Douglass knew from both the fear and rage that abolitionists provoked in enslavers that these people had some power. There was, too, still fear about insurrections of enslaved people in the wake of Nat Turner’s rebellion. This fear, coupled with an outbreak of cholera, convinced Douglass that God, too, must have been angry with the wickedness of enslavers.
When he was 13, Douglass accepted God as his “father and protector” (169). A white Methodist minister named Hanson awakened Douglass’s religious spirit. Putting his faith in God and Jesus Christ gave him newfound hope and love for all of humankind, including enslavers. His thirst for knowledge also increased. Unable to obtain his own Bible, he “gathered scattered pages from this holy book, from the filthy street gutters of Baltimore, and washed and dried them” (169).
Douglass soon met an old Black man named Lawson—the most devout man he had ever encountered. Lawson drove a dray for Mr. James Ramsay, who owned a ropewalk, or lane, on Fell’s Point. Lawson prayed three times each day. He lived near Hugh; therefore, Douglass began accompanying the elder man to prayer meetings unbeknownst to his enslaver or mistress. When Hugh found out about Lawson’s instruction, he forbade Douglass from ever visiting Lawson again and threatened whippings. Lawson had indelibly influenced Douglass, encouraging him to persevere, knowing that a wisdom greater than his own guided all things.
One day, on the wharf owned by a man named Mr. Waters, Douglass encountered two Irishmen “unloading a large scow of stone, or ballast” (170). He stopped to help them. When they finished, the men conversed with him and Douglass told them that he was enslaved. They found it a pity that someone as fine as he suffered from permanent servitude. They encouraged Douglass to seek freedom in the North, but he feigned disinterest in what they said, uncertain of their motives. It wasn’t unusual for white men to encourage enslaved people to seek freedom and then to kidnap and return them to their enslavers in exchange for a reward.
Besides, Douglass was still too young to carry out such a scheme. He also needed to learn how to write so that he could compose his own pass. To this end, he copied the italics in Webster’s spelling book. He then got hold of Tommy’s writing books when no one was home and copied the young man’s penmanship. Douglass also copied lines from the Bible and the Methodist hymn book while the Aulds slept. Father Lawson, whom he continued to meet, supported him in these endeavors. Hugh was aware, too, of Douglass’s continued visits to Lawson but never fulfilled his promise of whipping Douglass for his disobedience.
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Vicissitudes of Slave Life”
Though Douglass was living with Hugh Auld, he was still legally enslaved by Captain Aaron Anthony. Soon after Douglass left for Baltimore, Captain Anthony’s youngest son Richard died. Then, three and a half years later, Captain Anthony died, leaving Andrew and Lucretia to share his estate, divided between them. When Captain Anthony died, Douglass had to return because he was part of the property. He was worried about leaving Hugh’s home. The prospect also worried Tommy and Sophia Auld.
Douglass returned for evaluation with the other enslaved people, all of whom dreaded the prospect of living with Andrew—“distinguished for cruelty and intemperance” (177). Worse, Andrew was reckless with the management of property and had already wasted a large portion of his inheritance. He would probably sell any enslaved person who fell into his hands down south anyway.
Unlike his fellow enslaved people, who had remained in Tuckahoe where they received regular beatings by the cruel overseer, Mr. Plummer, Douglass had become accustomed to relatively kind treatment. He bristled at the thought of going to Andrew who had once seized Douglass’s brother Perry by the throat, slammed him to the ground, and stomped on his head until blood gushed out. Alas, Douglass fell to Lucretia Auld. Both she and her husband, Thomas, decided that Douglass would return to Baltimore. One month after his departure, Douglass returned to the home of Hugh and Sophia Auld. Soon after his return, Douglass got word of the deaths of both Lucretia and Andrew.
Douglass’s grandmother didn’t fare as well as her grandson. Though she had been a faithful servant all her life and had raised Captain Anthony from the time of his birth and “peopled his plantation with slaves,” she saw “her children, her grandchildren, and her great-grandchildren, divided, like so many sheep” (182). Her enslavers placed her in a small hut in the woods where she spent her remaining days, all alone.
After Thomas Auld remarried, he and Hugh quarreled over an enslaved woman with a disability named Henny. Thomas wanted Hugh to employ her services, though Hugh and Sophia found that they had no use for the young woman, whose hands had been badly burned from falling into a fire when she was a child. Hugh and Sophia sent the girl back, which Thomas took as an act of ingratitude. Incensed, he demanded that they send Douglass to him in St. Michael’s immediately. While aboard the sloop, or sailboat, that carried him from Baltimore to St. Michael’s, Douglass began planning to seek freedom from enslavement.
Chapters 11-13 Analysis
Douglass narrates his character development in this section as he moves from passive observation of the world around him toward more active engagement through reading. Still not yet fully literate, he relied on the scant pieces of literature that he could gather and snatches of conversation about current events. He knew, for instance, that the word “abolitionist” meant something in relation to his condition based on the emotions that it evoked within white Southerners. He also knew, via rumor, about Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in nearby Virginia.
Douglass contextualizes his life at this time within the events that he knew had occurred around him. He still had little concept of time, no way of knowing exactly what year it was. Instead, he figures that it was 1832 due to his awareness of the cholera outbreak, which had ravaged New York City and spread throughout the rest of the US, including Baltimore, via steamboat. It was one of five cholera pandemics in that century.
One of the key books that Douglass obtained at this time was The Columbian Orator, an anthology compiled by the educator Caleb Bingham. Nearly every American schoolboy at the time read the schoolbook, published in 1797, and it sold 200,000 copies. It comprised 84 selections on a range of popular issues, including individual liberty and enslavement. The selection that Douglass references is “Dialogue Between a Master and a Slave.” This book is a symbol of Literacy as the Gateway to Freedom.
Douglass’s reading of this speech correlated with his increasingly tense relationship with Sophia Auld, who seemed ambivalent about Douglass’s status as an enslaved person and her relationship to him. His expression of pity toward her demonstrates his deep ability to empathize with the ways in which white people, too, became demoralized by enslavement. However, he also remained cognizant of the socioeconomic and racial barriers that divided them and prevented them from speaking honestly to each other as the enslaved person and enslaver do in the dialogue.
No longer able to depend on Sophia for his education, Douglass found Lawson, who became a surrogate paternal figure. Though it was a white Methodist minister who had awakened Douglass’s religious spirit, Southern social mores prevented any bond from developing between them. Lawson also offered Douglass the social contact with other Black people that he lost after he left Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. Both his increasing knowledge and his outrage at how easily estates could upend his life convinced Douglass to plan to seek freedom from enslavement. He sought to liberate himself from the whims of enslavers who dealt with enslaved people as they would any other object in their possession.
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